User reviews

Wasted on the Young is an intense movie in the vein of Animal Kingdom but with a subject matter most similar to Brick. It is well crafted and the production value seems high for the tight budget they were undoubtedly restricted to.

The film is about a group of young people in an Australian private school whose lives are changed due to a horrific event that takes place at a wild party at the "alpha male" of the school's house. It is a very intense and engaging movie but unfortunately the ending was a bit of a let down and didn't really fit with the rest of the film.

The absence of any adult or authority figures in the movie is telling and the interaction between the perpetrators and victims is at times very disturbing.

It is a very interesting movie and it is a shame the ending wasn't as good as I hoped it would be but it well worth spending the time and money to see this film.

In a word: intriguing. In a few more, an ardent revenge film that shows substance and style in some areas, but appears to have bitten off more than it can chew in others. This little-known Australian film continues to follow the trend in the local film industry. That is, for every Kenny and Kings Of Mykonos crowd-pleaser released, many more dark and brutal Aussie films fall by the wayside only to be discovered by a handful of people each time, with Animal Kingdom being a noted exception.

The film follows Darren (Oliver Ackland), a nice-enough high schooler who spends most of his time around computers and homework. He is the polar opposite of stepbrother Zack (Alex Russell), whose priority is maintaining a reputation as Mr. Popular. Things take a sinister turn when the shy Xandrie (Adelaide Clemens, a dead ringer for Michelle Williams) is invited to one of Zack's house parties and goes missing for almost a week afterwards. By the time she returns, the school is rife with rumours surrounding her disappearance, and Darren, suspecting his stepbrother and his nasty bunch of friends, decides to find out the truth and punish those responsible.

As mentioned, cinematic style is a big part of Wasted On The Young, and may well be the film's highlight. Unique editing and camera-work during the house party scenes result in an indulgent, but not stereotypical, world that these kids inhabit. It's certainly no accident that the house used is an extremely modern one, full of glass corridors, open spaces and hidden rooms that allow the camera to almost become another character.

Wasted On The Young is rife with themes relevant to today's social landscape. Positively, these themes keep from interrupting each other because of the way they are presented one after the other, compounding the film's message. While it starts out as a critique of social networking, it soon becomes more about what our society may be reduced to in the absence of all authority, where the strong rule and the weak have no freedom. As if that wasn't intense enough, it goes on to pose a more challenging question: What happens when the weak decide they've had enough?

If that sounds like a badly concealed ad, I'll stop now. Because for all the thought-provoking ideas being presented, none of them are really driven home enough to make one think 'yes, that's the message the movie is trying to make.' The fact that it is set in a private school leads to a lack of realism regarding the whole 'no authority' angle, but once you make the connection that the setting only exists to support the metaphor, the film becomes a little more immersive. Other moments, including the climax, completely remove the moderation and consistency from a film that had remained fairly grounded in believability until that point.

The film could have dropped below the ninety-minute mark by cutting out a lot of gratuitous and unnecessary fluff during the Third Act. Fights and arguments among secondary characters were clearly included to both resolve character arcs and build the severity of the climax, but all they end up doing is ruining the pace and prolonging what has become a forgone conclusion by this point.

Nonetheless, in a choice simply between 'go' and 'don't go', I say 'go', if for no other reason than to make up your own mind on this ambitious endeavour.

*There's nothing I love more than a bit of feedback, good or bad. So drop me a line on jnatsis@iprimus.com.au and let me know what you thought of my review.*

WY is a violent, disturbing, low-budget Australian film whose plot and conflict are a bit similar to "Betrayed at 17" but go to lengths far beyond those of the Lifetime B-17. While it focuses mainly on the very darkest aspects of adolescence, it's pretty and sadly moving in a few spots, and the acting/characterization are undeniably real. WY also has a touch of the artsy and the surreal; it does a nice job of meshing certain characters' fantasies with their realities. Another interesting aspect of this film is how, although a few sparse adult voices are heard, the only visible characters are the teenagers, something I haven't seen anywhere outside of "Charlie Brown."

The pace of WY often plods (particularly in the middle), and the scope is limited almost exclusively to the teenagers' school and homes. Those qualities, along with the fact that WY's just generally a real downer, will obviously not appeal to some tastes. Others will find, as I did, that its better, more unique qualities make it a memorable and worthwhile experience.

I found it tough to rate this movie. First off, the acting and cinematography are great. The plot idea is superb. There are some great political and social overtones. (Kudos to the reviewer who said this was "Lord of the Flies meets Facebook." That's a great analogy.) It's clear that this is a "Peanuts" world where adults are out there somewhere, but can't be seen or heard. However, if the writers wanted to go that direction, they can't create a world with adults that's totally without them. In Golding's vision, the adults were simply not present. In this world, the adults are there, but totally inert. This ruins the movie in a few ways. I won't give away plot elements here, but there's a fight in the film. It's preceded by a chase through library, halls, classrooms, etc. and students pour out of those rooms. The fight continues unabated until one of the protagonists is defeated and hauled off. Yet no teacher intervenes when students abandon classrooms; nobody appears to halt the fight, help the injured or otherwise restore order. This is rubbish and the plot point could have been written many other ways to accomplish the same purpose.

I'm not giving a rating below 5 because it's not that bad. However, the basic plot and social situations exploited in this film had huge potential... potential I'd have given a 9-10 rating for... yet somehow flopped. Maybe in 10-20 years someone will give another go at this plot. In the meantime, only watch it if your current string of movies-to-see lacks better rated movies.

If I were a shooting enthusiast, this DVD would be quite useful as a skeet! As it is, I'm not a shooter and so the only other use I can think of for the disc is to use it to make a mobile where it will reflect all the colours of the spectrum and, maybe, give some pleasure - because, as a movie, it sure as hell doesn't give any!

I have often thought that I would like to visit Perth in Western Australia but, after wasting over an hour-and-a-half on this, I'm not so sure. It seems that there are no adults there - just mindless teenage morons who hold parties in mega-expensive houses and attend a school where there are no teachers and the haves enjoy bullying the have-nots. (I think - because, to be honest, I have no idea what was going on most of the time!). I have given this movie 1 point only because I liked Adelaide Clemens and hope that she hasn't totally ruined her prospects by allowing herself to be used in this load of rubbish.

Another reviewer has described this as Lord of the Flies with SMS and, whilst that is quite succinct, I think it does Lord of the Flies no favours because to even mention both film in the same breath is insulting!

This has to be the worst film I have seen since I-don't-know-when. Rather than watch it, take up shooting or go and make yourself a cool mobile!

I was given the opportunity to watch this film as a part of a special screening and focus group session. I didn't read up on the plot beforehand, but was given the general gist of it by my cousin, who somehow managed to turn it into Swimfan #2. Thankfully, he had no idea what he was on about. This film is anything but an ostentatious Hollywood slasher, and is every bit an indication of top-quality Australian cinema.

I don't usually give films 10/10 ratings as i am extremely picky about whose praises i sing, but this one went above and beyond any expectations i had. The opening sequence reeled me in hook, line and sinker; and i was mesmerised until well after the credits began to roll.

The cinematography is incredible. The production values seemed very high (whether this is the case or not, i am unsure) and there are some expertly filmed and executed scenes. The use of special effects to signal dream sequences and the omission of kitschy fogged lenses during flashbacks (colour saturation was changed instead) make this a visually stunning film.

The soundtrack also plays into the script exceedingly well, swelling into an overbearing presence during scenes to build tension and confusion, and being understated in others which develops a foreboding atmosphere.

The storyline reads like a clichéd teen flick that one expects will try too hard and not hit the mark, but the script development, along the performances of Alex Russell, Oliver Ackland, TJ Power and Adelaide Clemens ensures that this film achieves its purpose. It doesn't just tell a story, it involves you in the story and it leaves you questioning not only the villains doing wrong, but the heroes and their idea of "right". The film does an incredible job highlighting the incidence of school bullying and the environment that it occurs in as well as commenting on youth culture in general.

Although the film is set in an Australian high school, and based on final year students (~17/18 years of age), i fear many individuals in the target audience might miss out on the chance to watch this brilliant film; either through choice or lack of exposure. I feel this film would be incredibly useful if included in high school English curriculum as it would allow the teens it is aimed at a chance to watch the film, but also walk through all the issues and themes it raises.

This is, in short, a brilliant film. It ticked all the boxes for me and i strongly recommend this to anyone who enjoys powerful, provocative and intelligent films.

What I liked about this movie was that it made a very strong point on how dramatically can a life go south when you are young, fragile and think you're invincible and free to experiment all you want without serious consequences. In that light, it's a real eye opener, as I believe it's getting more and more hard for people to be young and safe at the same time.

I'm afraid the movie itself wasn't too much of a good job. Most of the scenes were over-dramatized, the dialogs did not offer much and there ass little room for exploring the true minds and souls of the characters.

What got my attention was the style of scenes - very contemporary cold-feeling interiors, design and colors mixed with the techno club music. All this was accompanied by visual effects like fast forwarding or slow motion. As a matter of fact, it was a dynamic cut. Maybe little too dynamic - there were certain scenes that were only visualized imaginations of characters and then the movie rolled back - which might have taken a while for the viewer to actually understand. These daydream-like flashes were triggering almost randomly and most of the time viewer could have very hard time understanding what has or hasn't happened.

Mood and content wise, the movie crushed everything possibly beautiful in a blood bath of modern darkness and shallowness, but I think it was meant to leave a reaction of bitterness in you, since the scenes and plot was quite drastic. In a strange way, it might be the intended message of the movie for the viewer to pick up.

I struggled watching this a couple times because I hated 95% of the main cast who are all more or less genuinely terrible people and this is obvious from the very start.

The movie deals with bullying and peer-pressure and the characters all felt rather real, plenty of similar characters from my old school for instance, and perhaps that is why it was initially hard for me to watch.

I won't spoil it but the script could have been rather memorable if it hadn't ended up taking a safer route in the end where it should have just hit the gas pedals and made more of an impact but instead it ended up taking a bit of a detour.

Visually it's very much on point though, has some gorgeous scenery and the acting is stellar as well, kind of a 'feel bad'-movie though and yeah it didn't deliver enough in the end for me not to feel that there was an opportunity to do something above average, but the director and script-writer missed it, leaving you a bit unsatisfied.

(Full disclosure: I am acquainted with director Ben C Lucas)

I saw Wasted on the Young at its world premiere at the Sydney Film Festival,and it got a strong reaction from the audience. I'm not sure I can say we enjoyed it, because it is a disturbing film in many ways, but it was certainly a highly impressive debut from a rookie team.

A plot synopsis will make it sound like a generic high school movie; cool kids bullying uncool kids, drug-fuelled parties and so on. Halfway through, though, an event occurs which takes us into altogether darker territory and what the director terms "a moral fable".

Technically, the film has many virtues. The bleached-out cinematography, the strikingly shot swimming pool sequences and the nightmarish music/sound design during the party scenes all serve the story well, and are far more ambitious than most Australian movies.

Wasted on the Young shows high school as a horrifying and hermetically sealed environment (I don't think we see any parents or teachers at all), and a cast headed by the impressive Oliver Ackland really convey the tension and conflict of the story.

Australia has no adults nor authorities. This is a movie that at any time could have a realistic plot with the addition of post-teenage rationalism, but instead we are stuck with hormones and sterile egos.

Is this what happens when there are no adults, no teachers, no authority figures, no police, no post-pubescent neighbors observing the self-servient and egotistical world of over-indulged, extremely privileged teens? This is Lord of the Flies redone with text messages. There is really no creativity here, no reality. The movie pits the brainiacs versus the jocks; the entitled versus the proletariat.

Kudos to the acting skills of several of the members and the film crew did a good job. It's the plot that disappoints. There is no higher meaning, no layers to scrape away and discuss after the credits roll. This movie is obvious, superficial, and without redemption.

Save time and instead of watching this, read something.

Here is an absolutely useless, waste of a time type of movie that starts off trying to be too cool for school and ends up being so disengagingly meaningless that just getting from one minute to the next, in this movie, was a struggle. This is a lesson in how not to make a film if ever there was one. It's as if they took the theme of "wasted" and did their best to make every element of its production wasteful. What a mess. absolutely everything about this movie is simply banal, meaningless drivel, with the occasional pretty girl thrown in for good measure.

Frankly it's so lacking in anything equating to engaging development of plot & structure that just writing a review about it is tiresome in itself. Watch this movie if only to know what it means to waste money on a production which should never have seen the light of day. I'm left wondering why I even gave it as much as 2/10...?

Darren (Oliver Ackland) is an introverted teen at a high class school. His step-brother Zack (Alex Russell) is the popular kid who often throws raging parties. Xandrie (Adelaide Clemens) is a sweet girl taken with Darren. She attends Zack's party hoping to find him. Instead, she is drugged and raped by Zack and his friends. The group starts spreading rumors about Xandrie as she struggles to put it behind her. Darren refuses to let it go.

There are almost no adults in this movie which gives it a great 'Lord of the Flies' feel. There are harrowing scenes and devastating bullying. It's disturbing. There is an incident with Xandrie that should stand as the climax. It really should be pushed back towards the end. The intensity fizzles after the incident.

could not figure out the the other ratings until i saw that they were from Australia, could understand 20 percent at best. How this gets by the people that made and market the film is mind boggling. Sub titles are needed here sadly, these people do not speaka the English. It is way worse then cockney English which you could possibly learn to follow. We are separated from Australians by a common lanquage. I am not a linguist so i am not sure what they are doing when they speak, its a combination of rapidity and the clipping of words, speaks slower and enunciate You can understand older Aussie films, so this is definitely something new, The film had a pricey budget so this is a error of the first degree. This is hubris, well i am stunned

Saw this at the Toronto International Film Festival. Thought it was stunning. A brilliant piece of film making. The story itself was compelling but also told in a way that did not reveal or signal. The use of dream sequences and flashbacks was great. The visuals were also outstanding, the underwater shots for me were unique. The large themes that were dealt with beyond the simple narrative made this film worth watching and it was done in a way that didn't hit you over the head. The music used also contributed greatly to the mood of the film. The choice to not show any adults, I recall only one teacher's voice but no shot of the teacher for example gave the film the Lord Of The Flies feel it needed to present this unique society which was an allegory for society at large. But all this done inside a suspenseful telling of a story that worked at the narrative level. Some very memorable line and scenes from this film. Loved it.

This film totally SUCKED! Jumped around too much. Had to figure out whether it was past or present. To disjointed to enjoy. Just because some jerk is rich doesn't mean he won't be shot in the head by his victim. I HATED THIS FILM! IT SHOULD BE BANNED FOR ITS LACK OF TASTE!!!

It's easy to see Ben C. Lucas' first feature, Wasted on the Young, simply as a stylishly directed teen melodrama on steroids and cocaine. In the film, the romance developing between the lovely-but-sassy Xandri (Adelaide Clemens) and the cool-but-geeky Darren (Oliver Ackland) is brutally thwarted by an all-powerful clique of popular kids led by Darren's step-brother Zack (Alex Russell). It is set mostly in either sleek school grounds or drug-fuelled parties, but there is not a school teacher or parent in sight. Early hints of impending violence are realized at a party at Darren and Zack's house, during which tech-savvy Darren prefers to stay upstairs in his room playing violent video games and chatting online, despite Xandri's text messages enticing him to join her. In the wake of the incident that occurs in Darren's absence, the tension and violence rise quickly to a fever pitch, as the popular clique uses technologically enhanced peer group manipulation to suppress their crime, and their victims seek their own technologically enhanced revenge. The twists and turns along the way artfully maintain the tension as the plot unwinds to its conclusion, and the young cast all give great performances, especially the menacing Alex Russell. As a straightforward thriller, the film also offers some easy morals, though the finger wags have been modernized to the era of social networking and cyber bullying.

But although it's possible to watch Wasted on the Young as just a teen-thriller, there is much more to get out of it. For instance, a more interesting way to watch Wasted is as fantasy. Or rather, twin fantasies represented by the two main characters, step-brothers Darren and Zack. One, Zack's, is the fantasy of ultimate popularity, freedom from authority and unrestrained hedonism. The parties in the film may seem unrealistic, the members of the popular clique may be one-dimensional and the power they wield, and the violence with which they wield it, may sometimes be absurd. But that is the point of a fantasy. The other fantasy, Darren's, is the dream of a humiliating and violent revenge shared by anyone who has been victimized by the powerful. Where you find Zack's fantasy, you also find Darren's.

These are common fantasies and the cinema has a long history of indulging them. Revenge fantasies in particular are a favourite of action films, thrillers and, especially, teen films. More and more, our wider culture also indulges Zack's fantasy. The technologies through which we increasingly communicate encourage vapid interactions and the quest for popularity and acceptance — as Zadie Smith recently pointed out, it's not hard to see that Facebook was dreamt up by a 19 year old male. And reality TV shows, perhaps the most Orwellian concept ever coined, indulge our love of popularity contests and our desire to eliminate the unwanted by the sheer force of popular opinion. This sort of fantasy world is the one the characters in Wasted on the Young seem to inhabit, and there are plenty of suggestions that this is what Lucas had in mind.

Seen in this light, Wasted takes just the form it should. The fancy-editing, ultra-slick production and relentless pace make for just the sort of popular entertainment we should think about more critically. It's exaggerated elements — like the violence and drug-taking — and some strange plot features (including the absence of adult interference) are weirdnesses that point to the fact that we're in the realm of wish fulfilment and nightmares. The film's saturation with social networking tools and recording devices isn't a transient comment about those particular technologies, soon to be outdated, but a more lasting observation on how the technologies we use consolidate particular ways of interacting with each other. And while on the level of a thriller the ending may seem over-the-top, it actually works to remind us of the sorts of entertainments we're so routinely offered. In this way it's not unlike the strange, post-climactic scenes of Taxi Driver. The film takes on the form of the fantasy it wants us to think about.

As a film highlighting our various fantasies and the way we, as a culture, indulge them in the cinema and elsewhere, Wasted is by no means unique. The most recent predecessor I can think of is Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, in which we are offered the ultimate revenge tale — obliterating bastard Nazi's! And in some ways there are parallels between the two films, since Wasted so deliberately recalls so many films, especially cult teen flicks (think Heathers and Donnie Darko to name just two). But Lucas takes the idea in new and interesting directions and uses a tense thriller as his vehicle. It's fantastic to see an Australian film, a Western Australian film in fact, that aims so high and achieves so much.

As a teen thriller, Wasted is genuinely compelling, but if that is the only way it is received then it really will be wasted on the young.

Look this story has been done - like a billion times - and done better.

Pull out every cliche in the book, make sure even the 'victims' are among the best looking people you'll ever meet.. etc.. etc..

There is nothing creative or unique about this film. It was pretty well shot and not entirely without any twist - but *

Very unsettling and made me angry to watch those horrible boys get away with rape and murder!

But I must say I still enjoyed this film... Was very impressive!!!

Stylistic Australian thriller of riveting and thought provoking atmosphere. This is original enough to keep me on the edge of my seat, and once again its another extraordinary debut for an Australian talent. Its also great to see an unknown cast break out of this, performances are great from Oliver Aukland and Adelaide Clemens. Its also scary to see in this teen world where Gen Y Kids interact in their world that adults know little or nothing about, you would then ask the question are they safe or not, and it gives them concern if their not. Visually impressive, it looks gentle on the outside but dark and keep pushing the boundaries to each level. After watching this I almost feel this could definitely use another viewing.